On the afternoon of the fourth day the moment came. I was out at my woodpile chopping logs when I saw the flock suddenly lift from the bottom of the front field. The flock flashed light and dark, light and dark, as the birds twisted and turned in sudden jerky movements, like winter dunlin on the estuary, but their hunter hung fast, its long tail swinging from side to side with each check, each sudden corner. The goshawks were back from their summer holidays. This hawk was out of luck though, for the raven family was near at hand over Penlan Wood and decided to intervene. The two adults dived right in and began to harry the hawk, while the young held back, for dealing with a hungry hawk was clearly an adult matter. After the first few passes, the hawk dived back, and the thrushes were able to slip away and make their escape during the brief distraction. And that was the last time I saw this particular flock of thrushes on my hillside that autumn; now the hawks were on the hill it was no longer safe for them there.
September, and the sun of summer lingered on. There were still a few wild flowers in the garden: the last fading yellow of the St John’s wort, and a straggle of red campion. There was a surprise tap at the window — a bumblebee that returned again and again to headbutt the glass and would not take no for an answer. There were still butterflies too, red admirals and painted ladies, though the first of my winter tortoiseshells was already asleep on my pantry ceiling. As my harvest began, the birds most in evidence were those that were busy with a harvest of their own. There was the constant tippy-tippy-tap of the nuthatches as they gathered acorns and cracked them open. The jays were out in force too, busily putting together their own winter stockpile, looping from tree to tree. They would drop from their perch, skim along the ground, and swoop up when they reached the next oak along, perching at the same height they had started from, making their journey twice as long as if they had flown straight and level.
The number of bats emerging from my loft at dusk was at its peak now that the year’s young were on the wing. One morning I went into my woodshed to find that the young bats had moved in overnight. They had obviously decided that they were getting too old for a nursery roost, and were having their first sleepover party. There were probably nearly twenty of them; it was hard to tell for they had all clustered together into a furry brown football hanging from a roof-beam just above my head. These were long-eared bats: tiny, extraordinary-looking creatures, with ears proportionately far larger than those of a rabbit or hare. They were handsome creatures in their own strange way, with sharp foxy faces instead of the snub noses of most bats. They slept with their ears tucked neatly under their folded wings, but they had heard me come in and began to unfold their ears and open their eyes. They started to yawn, their mouths wide in a silent scream. It looked as though they were trying to intimidate me with their minuscule pointy teeth, but in fact they were echolocating me, and it made me wonder how I looked in sound, in the bats’ strange synaesthetic world. When they started to flex their wings, I beat a retreat, for I didn’t want them risking flying outside in broad daylight. I could manage for a day without my woodshed, and I knew they would have no intention of staying there for the longer term — it was far too bright and exposed for them.
The first mixed flocks began to gather: tits and finches and goldcrests, with a scattering of migrant birds such as pied flycatchers and willow warblers, which I would see only a few more times before they set off for warmer climes. Down on the lanes the swallows were gathering, skittish and restless; one by one they would settle on the wires in a long line, then suddenly all take off again as if on a secret signal. The house martins were flocking too, high above. One year the martins came to my cottage, swooping up under the eaves with their beaks filled with mud that they would use as plaster, but they never completed their nests, and never returned. Perhaps one day. The mountain ashes, the rowans, were so heavily laden with berries that their branches drooped like weeping willows, showing the pale silvery undersides of their leaves. And the woods were beginning to look scorched, with just the outermost leaves of the canopy starting to turn, as if a flame had passed over the trees and singed them. There was autumn song in the woods: robins, virtually the only birds so determinedly territorial that they would set up a winter territory for themselves and not just a breeding territory. It was nice to hear, though — it felt like an echo of spring.
Down on the river there were still kingfishers and the last of the goosanders. And there were huge gatherings of mallards. In the winter there would be distinctly separate male and female flocks, but for now it was impossible to tell them apart for they all still looked almost identical in their eclipse plumage. In among the flocks were the occasional smaller ducks too: mandarins, also in eclipse, looking as if they were hiding their true colours, trying to blend in with the crowd. All along the banks were stands of Indian balsam, still bearing a few pink-and-white flowers like oversized snapdragons. In sheltered places the plants reached four or five feet high and as I brushed past them the tightly wound seed pods would explode, peppering me with tiny black seeds. They would be propelled several feet; some would end up in the river to start new colonies downstream, while others would collide with other plants and set them off too in a chain reaction, until the whole colony was trembling.
I sat on a large mossy boulder the size of a small car that protruded into the river, watching the water roll by and enjoying the autumn sunshine; I knew there would not be many more opportunities to sit in the sun for months to come. Every breeze that blew sent a shower of golden coins fluttering down on to the water, the yellowing leaves of the birches that were already beginning to fall. A single bat, a pipistrelle I thought, was following the river, and I wondered what it was doing out and about in broad daylight. A male sparrowhawk was working its beat above the riverside trees: soar, circle, soar, circle. Over in the big wood on the hillside opposite, where I knew that sparrowhawks nested each year, I could see three hawks above the distant trees, the year’s young still not dispersed. These birds needed to be wily; it was almost provocative how close this nesting site was to the keeper’s cottage and the rearing pens. But today everybody seemed to be out enjoying the sun regardless. They all suddenly melted into the trees as another, much larger, bird came cruising over the horizon of trees: one of the newly returned goshawks.
I made my way back up the hillside in the gloaming after my afternoon at the river, and noticed a mound of fresh sawdust on the track at my feet as I approached the edge of the beech wood. I looked up at the stone-dead horizontal bough that overhung the track above my head. There was a perfectly round hole in it, and as the branch was not thick enough for a deeper hole, I could see its occupant framed: a great spotted woodpecker, a male, its beak pointed straight up as though it were trying to ignore me. It would have been no surprise to find a woodpecker roosting in an old nesting site but I had no idea one would go to the trouble of excavating a brand-new hole solely for use as a winter roost. It would be in residence most times that I passed over the next few weeks, until a storm sent the old rotten bough crashing to the ground.